Citrix Access Gateway: Demystifying the .E releases

End of 2012, Citrix launched CloudGateway 2.5, and as part of that release, Access Gateway launched its version number – 10.0-71.6014.e. The .e in the version number has intrigued, as well as confused some of us. Let me try and demystify this.

Access Gateway (Enterprise) as you know, is based on the NetScaler platform. NetScaler has two different kinds of releases:

MR – Maintenance Releases

.E – Enhancement Releases

MRs are the regular maintenance releases that come out of a release branch and generally include all the bug fixes and critical security updates. Look at the NetScaler 10.0 release. 10.0 has a MR release that comes out almost every month, and continues to improve the quality and stability of the 10.0 branch.

.E releases on the other hand, as the name suggests, are releases that contain minor enhancements to the NetScaler code base. All major enhancements are made in the yearly major release, while minor enhancements or customer specific enhancements are made as .E releases. These releases do not have a fixed release schedule and are released on a need basis. If there is an enhancement that needs to happen, a release will be created.

So when Access Gateway has to make minor enhancements to the NetScaler code base to support the CloudGateway use cases, and it is not practical to wait for the next NetScaler major release, we put those changes in the enhancement branch. And that is why, we released the mystical 10.0-71.6014.e release.

Now the question that most of you will ask is – does this mean that the .E release will not get all the bug fixes that go into the regular MRs? Of course they will. E.g. we recently released 10.0-73.e. This release builds on the 71.e release, by adding some more enhancements, but also includes all the bug fixes that went into the corresponding 73 MR release.

The figure below illustrates this concept at high level:

To get the latest Access Gateway release that supports CloudGateway, always go to CloudGateway Downloads on Citrix.com, which will then point you to the right (and the latest) Access Gateway build, for that version of CloudGateway. For XenApp / XenDesktop use cases, go directly to Access Gateway downloads.